Spin cycle

Well, The Daily Mail Fail is at it again, this time with a claim that the CIA has declassified a book predicting the end of the world (which is going to happen soon, of course).  Illustrating the fact that there is no conspiracy theory so blatantly idiotic that there won't be people passionately espousing it, the whole thing has the End Times crowd running around making excited little squeaking noises, while the rest of us are wearing expressions like this:

The book is called The Adam and Eve Story, which should put you on notice immediately that we're not talking about hard science, here.  It's by a guy named Chan Thomas, a "former U.S. Air Force employee, UFO researcher, and self-acclaimed psychic," for whom, we're told, "there are no official records of [his] working directly for the CIA."

So we're definitely off to a flying start.

I guess there's no doubt that the guy's book, which was written in 1966, was considered classified until 2013, and only appeared on the CIA's database of declassified documents about a month ago -- and then, only 55 pages out of the two hundred or so in the original manuscript.  Why it was classified in the first place is uncertain, although it may be nothing more than the fact that anyone who worked on any sort of sensitive-to-security projects -- which Thomas apparently did -- automatically has anything they write classified until it can be reviewed and shown not to give away anything that needs to stay secret.

My surmise is the fact that it languished after that because no one at the CIA took it seriously enough to bother reviewing.

Anyhow, Thomas's claim is that there have been cataclysms on the order of every six thousand years, and we're currently overdue.  What happens during these catastrophes illustrates the fact that Thomas shoulda stuck with UFO research, or at least paid better attention during ninth grade Earth Science class, because the first thing that jumps out at me is that he does not understand the difference between the Earth's rotational axis and its magnetic poles.  This leads him to conclude that when the magnetic poles flip -- something that happens around every three hundred thousand years, not six thousand, so he's off by a factor of fifty, but who's counting -- it somehow affects the rotational axis, throwing continents and oceans around like a washing machine on spin cycle.  

The results are hella scary.  Thomas writes:

In a fraction of a day all vestiges of civilization are gone, and the great cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, New York — are nothing but legends.  Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before...  Winds with the force of a thousand armies will shred everything in sight with a supersonic bombardment, as a Pacific tsunami drowns Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand...  Calamity will overtake the entire North American continent within three hours, as an earthquake simultaneously creates massive cracks in the ground that allow magma to rise to the surface.

So I think we all can agree that this would be bad.  By the time it's all over -- in seven days, he says -- everything will be rearranged, with Antarctica at the equator (melting its huge ice caps), and the Bay of Bengal at what is now the North Pole.

By now you may be wondering what historical cataclysms "every six thousand years" he's basing this on.  I know I was.  You ready?

The Flood of Noah, and six thousand years before that, something about Adam and Eve.  (You might have guessed the latter based on the book's title; I have to admit by that point I'd already forgotten it, so this got an all-new eyeroll from me.)

Scholars of the Bible might be objecting by now that the Book of Genesis doesn't describe any kind of worldwide catastrophe centering around Adam and Eve, just some malarkey about a serpent and an apple and whatnot, and their being the ancestors of all humanity despite supposedly being the first people and having only sons.  But Thomas seems sufficiently detached from reality that this is only a minor quibble compared to some of the other stuff he says.

Despite the fact that the claim is (in a word) ridiculous, I've already seen three videos on TikTok that seem to treat the whole thing as deadly serious, with the fact that three-quarters of the original manuscript is still classified being used as evidence that the CIA is "hiding something" and "they're trying to prevent mass panic."

Trust me, the only people out there panicking over this are ones who see messages from God on their grilled cheese sandwiches.  And it hardly bears pointing out that you can't use pages you've never seen as proof of anything, given that by default we don't know what's in them.

Sometimes absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

In any case, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this.  But I will appeal to the conspiracy theorists: can you please try and give me better material to work with?  Because this one was kind of bottom-of-the-barrel.  Time to step up your game, folks.  It's positively making me pine for the good old days of HAARP and Nibiru and the Annunaki and "Birds Aren't Real."

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Planetary spin cycle

I try not to spend too much time focusing on completely loony ideas here at Skeptophilia.  Wackos are, after all, a dime a dozen, and grabbing the low-hanging fruit is kind of a cheap way to run a blog.  But sometimes I run into a claim that is so earnest, so serious, and at the same time so completely bizarre that it's kind of charming.

That was my reaction when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site called Bibliotecapleyades.  I have to admit that I have no idea what that means.  I know that biblioteca means "library" in Spanish, and pleyades sounds a little like "Pleiades," the star cluster that is thought among some of the astro-woo-woos to be the home of the Nordic aliens, who are tall, blond, blue-eyed, muscular, and drop-dead sexy.

Sort of Liam Hemsworth from Outer Space, is how I think of them.

Whether that's the origin of the name or not, I have no idea.  The site doesn't mention aliens, but given the rest of the content, I wouldn't be surprised if it came up at some point.

Anyhow, this particular page on Bibliotecapleyades is called "Earth Changes: Future Map of the World," and goes into how "international known [sic] and respected futurist Gordon-Michael Scallion" has a vision of how the world is going to end up.  And I do mean "vision."  His ideas aren't based on science (big shocker, there) but on his "ongoing visions concerning the Earth" that he experiences "sometimes as many as ten or more in a day, lasting from a few seconds to minutes."  But instead of seeking professional help for this condition, he started writing it all down, and put them all together into a unified, consolidated picture of what we were in for.

You really should look at the website itself, preferably after consuming a double scotch.  It's just that good.  But in case you don't want to risk valuable brain cells going through it, I present below a few highlights of what's going to happen.  Forewarned is forearmed, you know.

1. First, we're going to have a pole shift.  Scallion seems unaware that the position of the magnetic pole and the position of the rotational axis of the Earth are related but aren't the same, so he gets a little confused talking about the precession of the Earth's rotational axis (which is real enough; the Earth wobbles like a top, meaning that Polaris won't be the North Star forever) as somehow triggering a shift in the magnetic pole.  You get the impression he thinks when the poles reverse, the Earth is kind of going to fall over or something.  But he soldiers on ahead, saying that the Earth is going to be like "a washing machine that is out of balance in the spin cycle," and this is going to fling the poles about like damp socks.  Havoc will ensue.
2. Africa is going to fall apart into three separate continents.  Some waterways will open up in a kind of a "Y" shape, inundating large parts of what is now dry land.  Madagascar is going to sink into the ocean.  Don't ask me why.  The Pyramids will also end up under water, but the flipside is that before then, "there will be great archaeological discoveries."
3. The news is more positive for Antarctica, which is going to "be reborn, and become fertile land again."  In addition, the relics of the lost civilization of "Lumania" will be found when the ice all melts, and "great cities and temples will be discovered."  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  In the historical document "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft, some explorers went into Antarctica, discovered big abandoned cities and temples, and almost all of them ended up getting eaten by Shoggoths.  So we might want to be a little cautious about investigating "Lumania."
4. The tectonic plate underneath Europe is going to "collapse."  This will cause Scandinavia and Great Britain to sort of slide off the edge into the Atlantic Ocean.
5. The Middle East will be engulfed in war.  For a change.  But this one will be a "holy war with purification of the land by fire and water," whatever that means.  I hope no one tells the End Times folks about this, because they already spend enough time yammering on about stuff like this, and I really don't want to add any more grist to their mill.
6. North America also looks like it's in for a rough time.  California will split up into 150 islands, and the "west coast will recede to Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado."  How that will work, given that Nebraska is east of Wyoming and Colorado, I have no idea.  The Appalachians will be a long skinny island.  At least here in upstate New York it looks like I'll have beachfront property.

He then ends with a disclaimer, a little like the "this preparation is not intended to treat or cure any medical condition" thing you see on bottles of homeopathic "remedies."  He says:

[N]o event or prediction is final.  Predictions are given as probabilities.  Even at this time, consciousness can alter an event, modify changes in a particular area or at the very least help us to prepare for what is to come...  One final note, the areas of change presented in the Future Map of The World should not be taken as absolute.  They may differ from a few miles to several hundred miles depending on many variables.  In the end, Mother Nature and our own collective consciousness will have the final say.

Be that as it may, he provides us with a map of the world showing all of the new land contours.  I'd post it here, but I don't know how Gordon-Michael Scallion feels about the copyright on images he's created, so you'll just have to go take a look for yourself if you want to figure out whether it's time to pack up and move.  Here's a map of what the world looks like now, so you'll have a basis for comparison.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the deep end of the pool for today.  Me, I'm not concerned.  He didn't provide a timeline for all of these catastrophes in any case, so right now I'm going to worry about more pressing issues, such as how the hell we here in the U.S. ended up with a a twice-impeached, twice-indicted near-illiterate wearing orange spray tan as a serious contender for re-election as president.  Frankly, compared to that, "Lumania" doesn't really bother me much.

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Jerk analysis

Sometimes there are news stories that I have to feature here simply because they're cool.

This one came from some data collected by a mission called Swarm, consisting of three satellites which were launched in 2013 to study the Earth's magnetic field.  The mission is pretty important -- besides being critical to navigation, the magnetic field of our planet protects us from most of the cosmic particles that strike the upper atmosphere.  And -- somewhat alarmingly -- it appears we may be at the beginning of a geomagnetic pole reversal, when the magnetic field of the Earth flips for reasons still poorly understood.  (We know about 183 such pole reversals in the last 83 million years, which is about as long as we have good data for.  The oddest part is that they are anything but regular.  The shortest duration of a particular polarity was around 400 years -- and we've been in the current one for 780,000 years.)

What the current study looked at is a much more transitory phenomenon called a geomagnetic jerk, which sounds like a derogatory name for a geologist, but isn't.  Actually, it's a sort of hiccup in the magnetic field.  They were first discovered in 1978, when there was a sudden increase in the magnetic field intensity followed by an equally rapid decrease, only lasting a few days.  They can be localized geographically, too; there have been jerks that are measurable in North America and invisible in the magnetic field measured everywhere else.

The new study, released last week in Nature: Geoscience in a paper by Julien Aubert (Université de Paris) and Christopher Finlay (Technical University of Denmark) is called "Geomagnetic Jerks and Rapid Hydromagnetic Waves Focusing at Earth’s Core Surface."  It suggests that what's happening is twofold -- there's a slow convection within our metallic core that, combined with the Earth's rotation, gives rise to the magnetic field on the larger scale; but there are much more rapid, turbulent fluid motions, caused by rising blobs of hot liquid metal.  When those blobs impact the boundary between the outer core and the mantle, it results in shock waves that register on the surface as a jittering of the magnetic flux.

Simulation of the magnetic field within the Earth's core

The weirdest part is that the rising of the blobs (which would make a great title for a horror movie, wouldn't it?) begins a good twenty-five years before it registers on the surface as a jerk.  What process creates the blobs is still not understood, but this is at least a step forward.

"Swarm has made a real contribution to our research, allowing us to make detailed comparisons, in both space and time, with physical theories on the origin of these magnetic jerks," said Christopher Finlay, who co-authored the paper.  "While our findings make fascinating science, there are some real-world benefits of understanding how our magnetic field changes.  Many modern electronic devices such as smart phones, rely on our knowledge of the magnetic field for orientation information.  Being able to better forecast field changes will help with such systems."

All of which makes me wonder, however, how we're going to handle it when the overall magnetic field does its headstand, because the theory is that the field first collapses (or becomes highly erratic) before reforming with the opposite polarity.  I have this strangely hilarious mental image of people with their noses glued to the GPS on their cellphones all heading very efficiently to their destinations, and then suddenly they all start wandering off in random directions, never to be seen again.

Of course, it probably won't be nearly that much fun.

Um, I mean, "catastrophic."  "Catastrophic" is what I meant.

Anyhow, it's nice that we now have another piece of the puzzle as far as what's happening in the core of our planet, which -- as always -- turns out to be far more complex than we realized.  As far as jerks and pole reversals, we'll just have to wait to see what happens and find out if the models hold up under scrutiny.

As always.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

The end of the world as we know it

Seems like it's been a while since the world ended, you know?

For a while, it seemed like the world was ending every couple of weeks or so.  But since Harold Camping died, apocalyptic prophecies have been a little thin.  So I'm glad to announce that once again, the world is ending, this time on December 28, 2019.

At least it's after Christmas.  I kind of like Christmas.

What's funniest about all of this is that there have been 89 serious prophecies of the End of Everything in the last hundred years, twelve of which came from the Jehovah's Witnesses.  That's not even counting all of the ones before that, when every religious sect in the world periodically threw a "Countdown to the Apocalypse" party.  And I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is still here, kind of loping along, without the appearance of Scarlet Whores of Babylon or Apocalyptic Horsepersons or Dragons with Seven Heads and Ten Crowns.

Which brings up the question of why a dragon would have ten crowns if it only has seven heads.  Do three of its heads get two crowns each?  If so, does he just kind of stack them up?  It seems like the sensible thing would be to have an equal number of heads and crowns, but maybe I'm just not thinking enough like a dragon.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, this latest dire prediction comes from David Montaigne, whom, you may remember, has predicted the end before.  In fact, he said that the world would end in 2013 (since the December 2012 Mayan Apocalypse didn't happen), and when we got to January 1, 2014 with nothing untoward happening, he revised that to 2016.

Both times, you might want to know, were supposed to be caused by Barack Obama.

Since a flat 0% success rate is not nearly enough to discourage these people, Montaigne is at it again, this time aiming for the end of December of this year.  Apparently the cause this time is an astronomical alignment which will cause massive earthquakes and volcanoes.  Here's what he has to say about it:

On December 21, 2019, survivors will experience the first day of a pole shift – when the entire surface of the planet will shift out of position and move over the more fluid layers beneath the crust.  Over the next few days this will cause earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanic activity which will almost completely destroy what is left of our civilisation.  There is a mountain of evidence in historical, geological, and biological records showing such pole shifts have happened before.  Even the Bible describes them repeatedly.  I think that we will experience another pole shift for the week following December 21, 2019, getting worse each day until the natural disasters culminate on December 28 – Judgment Day.

Well, first of all, the "pole shift" he's apparently referring to is the flipping of the magnetic poles, and has nothing whatsoever to do with movements of the crust or (worse) the axis of the Earth.  Now, there's no doubt that this will wreak havoc on navigational systems; in fact, recently the North Magnetic Pole has been wandering around quite a lot, moving at a rate of 55 kilometers a year.  (If you want to see a map of the positions of the North and South Geomagnetic Poles, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a great one.)

None of this has a thing to do with earthquakes and volcanoes, however.  And it's unlikely that the Bible has anything to say about pole reversals one way or another, since the last one occurred 780,000 years ago, and according to people of Montaigne's stripe the Earth is only 6,000-odd years old.

So I'm perhaps to be excused if I'm not all that alarmed by this.  Yeah, if the poles flip it'll take a while for GPS and other systems to compensate, and I'll probably have to accustom myself to being lost even more than usual.  But other than that, I suspect that (1) Montaigne has no idea when the reversal is actually going to take place, because basically, neither do the scientists, and (2) he doesn't have the first clue what pole reversal actually means, and (3) we'll all make it to December 29 un-judged and still moseying on.  So if you were counting on being Raptured Up To Heaven and not having to work in 2020, you might want to reconsider your options.

Oh, and after Montaigne made his announcement, he wrote a wonderful post on his blog called "Are My Books Being Discredited Because I'm Actually Onto Something Important?"  Which requires us to invoke Betteridge's Law, that "any article with a headline in the form of a question can be summed up with the answer 'No.'"

There's a part of me that's kind of disappointed by this.  Some Trumpets and Seals and Bowls and Dens of Iniquity would kind of spice things up around here.  I live in rural upstate New York, which is -- and I say this with great affection -- kind of boring at times.  Especially in the middle of winter, when we're usually calf-deep in snow.  So if the Antichrist showed up, at least it would break the monotony.

Which probably means it won't happen.  Disappointing, that'll be.  But there's the consolation, global-disaster-wise, that we'll still be in the Donald Trump presidency (provided he's not impeached or otherwise run out of town before then), and they seem to be doing a good enough job of setting us up for Armageddon as-is.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.